The Life and Casualty Company hopes that by increasing

Question

The Life and Casualty Company hopes that by increasing its environmental fund revenues to $1.2 billion, that it has set aside enough to pay for environmental claims and no longer has to use its profits and capital to pay those claims bit by bit, year by year.

Option AOption BOption COption DOption E

(This question is from Official Guide. Therefore, because of copyrights, the complete question cannot be copied here. The question can be accessed at GMAT Club)

Solution

Sentence Analysis

The Life and Casualty Company hopes that (Main Clause. Subject – “The Life and Causality Company”; Verb – “hopes”)

that it (“that” is repeated here. This repetition is incorrect. “it” is the subject of the “that” clause)

has set aside enough to pay for environmental claims (first verb of “that” clause – “has set aside”)

and no longer has to use its profits and capital (second verb of “that” clause – “has”)

to pay those claims bit by bit, year by year. (infinitive phrase modifying “use”)

The sentence talks about what Life and Casualty Company hopes. It hopes that by increasing its environmental fund revenues to a level, it has enough to pay for environmental claims and does not need to set aside some amount every year to pay those claims.

The sentence has the following problems:

The repetition of “that” is incorrect.

Since the “hope” is forward looking i.e. looking into the future, as indicated by “bit by bit, year by year”, the use of future tense “will no longer have to” is preferable over the present tense “no longer has to”.

Option Analysis

(A) Incorrect. For the reasons mentioned above.

(B) Incorrect. For the following reasons:

As is, “it will no longer” seems like an independent clause. To indicate that it is also a part of “hope”, “that” needs to be repeated before this clause. In general, “that” needs to be repeated for every clause for parallelism and also for meaning clarity.

Since the beginning modifier is “by increasing…”, it is highly preferable to have the subject of the clause the entity that will be doing the action of “increasing”. However, in this case, “enough” is the subject of the clause, leaving one in doubt “who has increased…?”

The position of “no longer” after “will have” is incorrect. The correct positions are “will no longer have to” and “no longer will have to”.

(C) Incorrect. “having” is not parallel to anything before ‘and’.

(D) Incorrect. For the following reasons:

“having” acts as a verb-ing modifier modifying the preceding clause and thus needs to make sense with the subject of the preceding clause, which is “enough”. Clearly, “having” doesn’t make sense with “enough”.

Problem no. 2 of option B.

(E) Correct. Both the problems of the original sentence have been rectified in this option.

About Chiranjeev Singh

An Alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad and with scores of 780 (2017) and 770 (2013) on GMAT and 99.98%ile on CAT, Chiranjeev is one of the most qualified GMAT tutors in India. Chiranjeev has earlier served as Director of Curriculum at e-GMAT.
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